


When The Sunset Eats The Sky

by uminoko



Series: Memory's Voice [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-14 12:16:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 7,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1266193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uminoko/pseuds/uminoko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It has been a year since Widow Hunt, with no resolution forthcoming.  This is a mostly canon-compliant version of what may or may not have happened, with occasional smut.  The titles of the chapters are taken from Anna Akhmatova poems.  If you would like to skip the naughty bits, they are the chapters in parentheses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Manage Badly But Live Gloriously

Before awareness even dawns, Natasha smells the hospital: metal and meds, white sheets and fluorescent lights. The light has a smell of its own: like chlorine, but more acidic; chemicals. They probably pumped enough into her to safely transport a large mammal across the ocean, because one of the perks of being, well, her, is that drugs and poisons cannot keep her down for long, yet down they are keeping her, so perhaps it is time to wake up.

"Hey," Steve says, even though her eyes are still closed, and she frowns in response. She didn’t realize speaking would be difficult. The words are dry and catch in her throat as she opens her eyes.

Rogers. Barton. Looking like—

"Clint…your dog die?" she gasps, then blinks against the bright, bright light, and decides that keeping the eyes open is not worth it.

Nervous laugh, and Clint rubs his jaw. “Yeah, no, the dog’s fine. You’re alive, too?”

This goddamn headache. ”What happened?”

She imagines she can hear Steve’s jaw tightening as he shifts from foot to foot.

"That bad?" Natasha would laugh, but she’s not laughing.

"Natasha, your memories were erased."

Silence. _Again?_ She sighs and settles back in her bed.

Steve stands like he has been called to attention. ”I’m not sure how much you remember, but basically, you were on a mission, it went south…”

Natasha wiggles her fingers. ”Steve. I have a headache from hell, I can get the full story later. We can sit around and dissect the events second-by-second, figure out what went wrong and whose fault it is.”

That was too many words to convey that something wasn’t worth talking about. She winces. ”Were they important ones?”

"Yeah," Clint says, sitting down in a nearby chair. "Just - OK, specific ones. Do you remember the last few years, and um, Steve being dead?"

She moves her head like a nod. “It happens. There was Osborn…”

"Norman fucking Osborn -“

"Stop." Steve cuts Clint off with a single glance. "Do you remember who took the Shield?"

His voice sounds so hopeful, Natasha thinks, and then she thinks about what he’s asking, and then she thinks some more, and the light smells like chlorine, and the machine beeps. Someone took the Shield. Tony tried to give it to Clint for a while, she remembers that.

She looks at Clint, who fidgets.

No, it was someone else, but the memory is slipping the harder she tries to hold on to it.

"Why would someone want to erase my memory of the interim Captain America?"

"He’s your boyfriend, Nat," Clint blurts, drawing his hands apart. "Or…was…Aw, hell."

Steve looks away. Natasha closes her eyes, for a longer time, and searches her mind for the idea of a ‘boyfriend.’ She’s been so busy the last few years, how could she have had time?

Exhale. “Is he alive?”

Who was he, and where is he, and did I get him killed?

"Oh," Clint sits up, palms down on his thighs. "Oh, yeah, he’s alive. He’s fine." - he catches Steve’s eye. "Really broken up about all of this, though."

"He’s been outside, Natasha." Steve’s voice sounds so even, carefully so. Why the defensiveness? Must be someone close to him. "He doesn’t know what to do."

She tries to pull herself up, bending her will upon bending her elbows, but it isn’t working. Anger flashes, but it’s useless. “I want to talk to him.”

"Nat-"  
"Are you sure?"

Steve and Clint speak at the same time, shaking their blond heads, and blinking their blue eyes, and Natasha almost laughs, because look at them, poster children for America. Steve’s eyes are bluer, and his hair is blonder than Clint’s cornsilk head. He still looks like the big brother Barton should’ve had. Not that he looked older - he never will, but Steve has a solidness to him that Clint doesn’t.

Refreshing, that light that Clint carries. She won’t see him for months at a time, but lately he has been turning up like a scuffed-up penny, or maybe a whole quarter. Was he friends with that boyfriend person, too? Her memory flows smoothly around the absences. When it came to Matt, Clint always made sure to put smudges on the outside of his red glasses, just to be extra petty, even though he reasons were long past. It warmed her heart.

But the decision is hers.

"I said. I want to talk to him," and her voice gains strength with anger. "If he’s hovering outside the door, he might as well come in and talk."

They look at each other again, then walk off to whisper in the corner.

"I can still hear you," she says, then she coughs.

Steve looks back at her, face drawn with an annoying amount of concern. “OK.”

"OK," she leans back. "Rogers, bring me water."

He smiles. “Yes, ma’am.”

Steve leaves the periphery of her vision, then comes back with a plastic cup. Clint gives a hollow laugh. “You got it pretty good, Natasha, Captain America as your personal nurse?”

She smiles back, weakly. “Thank you.”

"We’ll give you a moment," Steve says and they both step out. As the door cracks open, Natasha spots short dark hair in the hallway.

"Hi, Hill," she tells her cup and sips the water, which for some reason also tastes faintly like chlorine. Damn these hospitals.

Maria Hill instinctively understands that Natasha doesn’t want to be clucked over, unlike the two Boy Scouts, and she appreciates that. They never could be called friends, she and Hill, but seeing the former Marine rise through the ranks of SHIELD and go from falling under Fury’s spell, then the inevitable disillusionment and the subsequent grudging respect reminded Natasha of herself somewhat, had she any kind of a normal life. Hill never allowed herself to be bullied, not by Fury, not by Stark, not by Natasha herself. Every once in a while, she wishes Hill would just sit down and take a bubble bath with a large glass of champagne, maybe after a full-body massage by a team of licensed spa therapists, because one day, she is going to work herself into the ground trying to run everything, but she showed them. She showed all of them.

Natasha sets the empty cup aside and listens to the monitors, beep after beep, and the static running in the walls. She begins to feel her lips, her fingers, and the sharpness at the edge of her thoughts again. Under normal circumstances, if there was nothing to do, she would be recounting the events of the previous day, waking to dreaming, as a memory exercise or a way to fall asleep, but the immediate past is a soft grey cloud, and it seems she can’t trust anything further back.

Eventually, the door opens, and a stranger walks in.

He’s handsome, and moves like a wolf who has skipped a meal. Cheeks dark with shadow that is beyond a 5 o’clock, eyes dark with other shadows, worries, sleepless nights. Haunted is the word, she thinks, or maybe exhausted. Natasha certainly is.

He’s avoiding eye contact.

"Hi," she says.

The man flinches for a fraction of a moment before nodding his hello, and sits down in the chair beside her bed, the one in which Clint sat half an eternity ago. He hesitates, then pushes the chair a little farther from the bed, to what he seems to think is a proper distance.

"No, I don’t remember." She purses her lips. "I’m sorry. This must be very difficult for you."

"I - it’s - Why did you want to talk to me?" His voice is almost as raspy as hers, and she wishes she could summon Steve to bring him some water, or otherwise somehow comfort the man who was obviously important to him. Even if he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, asking questions like that.

"We had a relationship, before it was…mmm, stolen from me, to be melodramatic," she explains. "There must have been a time when your opinion mattered to me, and I hope mine still matters to you."

She smiles to soften the words, and he looks at her with an expression that almost knocks her back into the pillow with its force.

"Of course it matters," he says firmly, and she feels a shiver in her spine. He loves me is the first thought, he’s a killer is second, but they come so closely together that it’s hard to tell them apart, and even through the fog, she feels a thrill.


	2. (a memory)

Here's a story: there are moments she catches like the proverbial spider in the proverbial web, and drinks them in until nothing but a husk of memory remains. She could never explain which droplets of time she selects as her victims, and had she kept a journal (which she, of course, did not- how could she?) they would not make it there either, because words are inadequate for the magic of the mundane. Here, a morning captured in amber; there, a night soaked in rain, and the taste of gunpowder tea and honey.

Later, when the time comes, Natasha remembers that they say very few words to each other, but, as in many other activities, dance together in a shared space with steps well-honed by time and respect for each other's solitude. They come together, they drift apart, they wash off the day, the week, the latest stretch of the world's wilderness. The shower is, too, a ritual, especially after the missions, because there is always water at the beginnings and endings of things, and the shower is a holy in-between place. They are casual in their reverence. He is mesmerized by the blood-like gleam of her wet hair and the clear drops that travel from its ends and to her breasts. She is distracted with the taste of tea on his lips, but she pushes him back and makes love to him with her hands, then tongue, until he arches his back and comes, without much fanfare, in her mouth. It's been a long week, and they're both tired. When his fingers unclench around hers and he's able to move, he pulls her up and holds her, briefly. Then, the water runs cold, and it's time for those damn fluffy towels.

James moves through the apartment half-awake, finding the bed by instinct, some kind of a subliminal sense that lets him know the exact location of the only place in the world that smells like Natasha as much as Natasha herself does - something clean and female. His body feels boneless, heavy, spent, and the last few days have already disappeared, as if they had never happened at all. He is conscious, vaguely, of Natasha arranging herself under the blanket and around him, resting her fingers on his shoulder. James is already asleep when the back of his head hits the pillow, like a revolutionary shoved against a wall, ready to face the firing squad of sleep in his lover's 1200-count organic cotton sheets.


	3. Dreadful To Guess In A Yet Unknown Smile

"I’m sorry. This is awkward enough already. I’m going to ask you if you don’t mind-" she starts speaking slower, with deliberate hesitation, like snowflakes settling down on the skin. "If I could have some space."

There is actually so much space between them, he may as well be on a different planet. He tugs at his left sleeve, nodding. Anything. Anything you want. His eyelashes are dark, darker than you’d expect on a man, but softer than Stark’s.

"I don’t mean to offend, I understand this is bad time for you, but…how much do you know about me?"

He almost smiles. ”Enough to know I don’t know everything.”

Natasha smiles at him gently, so gently. “So you may know my feelings about…being with someone I don’t love.”

He closes his eyes.

"I’m so sorry," she reaches out to him, but he recoils from her hand: an involuntary gesture, reflexes faster than manners dictate, and her heart breaks. "No please, listen, that’s not what I’m saying."

She keeps talking despite the cold slithering through her insides, because if she stops, she won’t be able to say another word. ”Please,” Natasha says softly. “Please, just give me some time. I know I loved you once.”

She doesn’t know that.

"I think you did," he says, not raising his eyes from the floor, head at an obstinate angle. "It saved me." He looks up. "I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…"

"No, no." She holds up her hand, but ends up only being able to move her fingers, because her muscles seem filled with lead. "No." Her head is swimming. She tries to get a hold of her thoughts desperately, but they are slipping away. "I’m sorry. I’m not quite myself."

He gives a short laugh. “Yeah,” then his eyes grow wide, as if he is worried about propriety once again. “I’m sorry.”

"OK, fine, we’re both sorry." Natasha is tired, she is so tired. "i’m just asking for some time. Some time to get back to who I am, and work everything out, OK? On my own terms."

"The only terms that you ever accepted," he says, and then he grins, this sudden schoolboy grin, like sunshine cutting through the clouds, and, god, the chin dimple…

She can’t help but echo back. “You do know me.”

The smile fades, and he tugs on his sleeve again. Nervous tic? Hiding something?

"This is going to sound so bad," she says, raising eyes to the ceiling, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. I’m flirting with this man, and I can’t help it. Get a hold of yourself, Romanoff.

"This is going to sound awful, but I don’t remember your name. Or where we met, or anything, but it would be really helpful if I could address you as something other than ‘that guy,’" she smiles, but it isn’t funny.

"No, it’s OK," he pulls the corners of his mouth down, then up, then runs his hand through his curls that are probably so stubborn in the morning. "For a while there, I didn’t remember my own name, so I don’t blame you."

Well, there’s a story there, no doubt. A story for later, then?

He sighs and tugs at his sleeve. “It’s James Buchanan Barnes. Steve calls me Bucky, so does everyone else. You call me James.” He looks her right in the eye, so honest and desperate, as if the sound of his name will bring back the precious memory taken from both of them.

But it doesn’t. She holds his gaze for a few long moments, noting how dark his eyes are.

"Why? she breathes, not looking away, so he is the one who turns his head.

"I dunno. Bucky’s pretty stupid, I guess,’ he shrugs.

James. She tastes the word soundlessly in her mouth.

He misses it. “Uh, we met…We…” He sounds like he is about to plunge ten feet into freezing water. “We met in the Rooms.”

It is her turn to shift away, toward the wall, recoiling. Men in the Rooms served in only one capacity that she knew of.

He looks up sharply, balls up his hand in fists. “No, no, Natasha, wait, no, I was - I was…”

He brings his hands to his eyes, presses the heels into his forehead. “I was a weapons instructor. Fighting, English, that sort of thing. I wasn’t…It’s not what you think, I swear. I swear.”  
She looks over at him, head in his hands. There is something in his voice that bleeds frustration, a kind of a scabbed, holy guilt. It’s true: he didn’t know. He couldn’t have been a handler. He must have only known his little corner of the cage.

Natasha chews on her lip. She could reach out and put her fingers on the messy curls on top of his head, but the distance between them is too great for gestures of absolution, and certainly not in this fog. “James,” she says, willing the name to sound like a touch, and sees him shiver all through his shoulders, looking up.

She wishes everyone would stop staring at her with expectation. No, dammit, I don’t remember, no miracle has occurred between this second and the last, sorry to disappoint. She knows he can’t help it.

"I’m sorry," he says.

"It’s OK," says she.

Why do all SHIELD hospital rooms feel the same, as if everyone who enters is wrapped in a cocoon of red tape, although everything is grey and white, aenesthesized. The air seems hard to breathe here.

"There was a suggestion to consult Dr. Strange." 

His voice is heavy with care, and his words have been chosen carefully, so she responds in kind. “Smart suggestion. I’ll take it under advisement.”

He looks at Natasha, questioning.

"No offense to Stephen, but I’m not a big fan of magic. Superstitious of me, maybe, it’s just that I don’t enjoy the feeling of anyone rummaging around in my head, for whatever purpose, and magic tends to work in unreliable ways, ways that backfire. I’m going to wait until the consequences of the last excursion fade." She taps her temple lightly. " I don’t know how long it’s going to take, so I’m going to ask for your patience."

Nodding, then, and there is nothing but weariness in him. ”What will you do in the meantime?”

Natasha interlaces her fingers, sighs, looks up to the ceiling, as though she is expecting the answer to come from above, which it doesn’t, of course. “Put my life back together, work. Check up on a few leads. See what methods I can take for recovery that don’t involve anyone…else…in here.”

He watches her, palm on her temple. It feels like being watched by a storm before it uproots everything around, throwing furniture into the walls, smashing the monitors with their unceasing beeping.

"I’ll wait," he pulls his left sleeve over his fingertips completely. "Or you can tell me not to wait. I’m not really the sort of person you have to worry about with this sort of thing, I won’t take it personally."

Natasha can tell he believes himself when he says it, so she believes him, too.

Silence flutters around the white-grey corners of the room. The pressure on her heart lifts, now, and one word tumbles out, heavy as a stone, and she feels lighter for having said it. “Wait.”


	4. (a memory)

They come into the apartment holding hands, laughing all the way up the stairs, especially during the parts where he stopped two stairs below her and pulled her down to him, kissing her lips lightly, kissing the soft skin of her jaw, where tiny pink scars have not yet healed from the last mission, though no one else could see them, and her neck that smells like clean water.

They laugh as she fumbles with the keys.  He stomps through the doors in his heavy boots, and drops his heavy jacket on the floor, but she doesn't care, she pushes him against the wall, and he grins his wicked grin, like he knows what's coming.  She slams him, and the back of his head hits the brick, so he stops moving then. She pins his wrists to the wall and flows down the length of his body, to her knees. His eyes widen, his fingers twitch, so she relents, letting him go for a moment to undo his belt and pull down his zipper. He sighs, stroking her hair, thick and soft and red, washing over his fingers, gently, gently.

  
She runs her hand over his cock, already hard, for what it seems like hours, _honestly, god, why is she taking so long, why won't she_...And then she does, she takes him in her hot mouth, and he doesn't know it, but his hands clench in her hair, almost painfully, pulling her closer. She moans. His hips jerk, helpless, endlessly vulnerable: his cock is trapped between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, his back is against the brick, there's nothing but her warmth and wetness.

  
She doesn't move, as though she's forgotten, but of course she hasn't, she's just holding him there. The red streams between his fingers; he gathers her hair up, then lets it fall over her shoulders, anything to take his mind off the fact that she has her lips wrapped around his cock, and she's not moving.

  
His hand cups the back of her head as though by itself. The metal one. The one that doesn't know how soft her hair is when it's wrapped around his fist. He moves his hips, slow at first, then hard, fast, driving himself into the back of her throat relentlessly. He doesn't know it, but he's talking, oh, yes, like that, oh, so good, god, you feel good. He can't keep track of limbs anymore, but she's got one small clever hand resting on his thigh, steadying him, and the fingers of the other one touch his hand lightly, and his hand is touching the wall, and this one can feel the cool brick on its palm, and her soft skin. He doesn't see her own hips shifting involuntarily in rhythm to his own. The only thing he can focus on is holding her head as he fucks her face, because he's going to collapse if he lets go. Letting go has never worked out well for him. But she pushes it, takes it all the way down, swallows, and then his hands tense, and he groans, and his dick pulses in her mouth, and then they're both still, and he comes for what seems like minutes, but it's just seconds stretching like honey, holding her head reverently as his cum rolls down her throat.

She lets him rest there for a moment, then pulls away and looks up at him, smirking with shining lips. His knees seem to just happen to give way, and he sinks to the ground next to her. They stay like that, holding each other, for maybe an eternity, and then he remembers to kiss her, tasting himself on her like a mark.  


	5. We Are Life’s Guests A Bit

"Don’t you think it’s ridiculous that some lanky long-haired asshole gets to waltz in and ruin your life? He didn’t even have a code name or anything, unless Lanky Long-Haired Asshole was what he went by in the asshole circles," Jess pauses in her diatribe to raise the glass to her lips. The wine makes her mouth gleam red.

"He didn’t ruin my life, he just made it a little more annoying. I’m fine." Natasha slides the cheese platter towards her. "Besides, not all of us blow up our memories to save the world, you know."

"That is a low blow, Romanoff." Jessica pouts, then pops a Brie-lined cracker in her mouth. "I was going for a compliment? You know? Legendary super spy?"

"Oh no, don’t think I’m not frustrated."

Jess widens her eyes expectantly at Natasha, then seeing as how no further commentary is forthcoming, makes the best of the pause and eats another cracker. Natasha gets up for another bottle of wine from the kitchen.

"Why are we in this apartment, by the way?" Jess asks as her glass is refilled. Tactful, that Jessica, must be all that spy training. Natasha can’t hold that against her, considering the girl had about as much control over her early life as Natasha herself did, minus the respite of The Great War. But isn’t it strange how life turns out, ex-test subjects for opposing sides drinking wine together in New York? America, what a country.

Natasha can’t even swear to whatever the hell side they were on at any given time.

"Because the Manhattan one is mine." She sits down with the now-full glass. "He did offer to pack his stuff and move out of the one where we apparently lived together, but…"

She sighs. Even if he were to collect the stacks of motorcycle magazines, assorted socks, and questionable beer from that place, there was no getting around the feeling that it was once a home shared by two. Everything in it felt like it didn’t quite belong to her. There pictures of her she didn’t remember taking; well-executed shots featuring her smiling from the bounds of the frame with unmistakeable warmth. There were mementos evoking nothing. Natasha felt like a ghost standing next to him when he opened the door, and she thought that he may have shared the sentiment.

"But I wouldn’t do that to him," Natasha finishes.

"It would just be too weird, right?"

"Right. He moved anyway."

They drink in silence.

"So, Steve told me that officially, I was involved with a dead man. I’m sure there’s a pun with my code name in there somewhere, but I take it you found out somehow? Most Avengers don’t know."

"Clint told me," Jess purses her lips.

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Of course he did.” That man literally cannot keep his mouth shut to save his life.

"Well, it’s not exactly his fault. He just mentioned Bucky in passing, like, oh, I just got off that mission with Barnes, and I was like, wait, Barnes?" Jess acts the conversation out, waving a strawberry. "He tried to play it off like he meant his brother, and I was just — Barney? You’re going on missions with Barney now?" She shakes his head.

"Oh my god," Natasha says.

They drink.

"You should talk to Carol," Jess says, staring at her reflection in the wine glass.

"About what? Are we starting a club?"

She looks up from her red-tinged, distorted features, and grins. “Yeah, I heard they’ve got t-shirts. ‘I lost memories of my loved ones and all I got was this stupid t-shirt.’ Memorabilia for the memory-impaired!”

Jess takes two large-ish gulps of the wine. It’s a pleasure, sometimes, to play the straight man to her, or, well, the straight woman, although that’s a joke for both of them.

"It’s a job hazard, Jess, we’d have to include everyone on the team-"

"hasn’t happened to Steve Rogers lately-" Jess interjects.

"-Steve died-"

"-yeah, but just a little bit-"

"It still sucked!"

"At least he wasn’t a Skrull."

"Yes and you and Bobbi can go start your own club."

"We already have a club."

"Clint Barton Is A Dumbass Club? I’m in that club!"

"You founded the club!"

Natasha laughs despite herself. “I guess I did, didn’t I.”

Jessica takes a half bow. “It’s been an honor and a privilege.”

There is still a hurt behind her eyes.

"Come on, if we had a memory loss club, we’d have to call Tony Stark."

"Well, that would just be weird."

"And that’s why you always, always back up your hard drives," Jess says and they clink their glasses.


	6. (a memory)

She can tell he's broken, that they did something to him, maybe even made him revert. There's nothing to do, really, but there is an emptiness at the bottom of his eyes, and she wonders, despite herself, how many broken men she is destined for in her life, and the answer comes as soft and simple as summer rain: one more, always just one more.

She touches him minimally and lightly, joking about his smell, and yes, there is the stink of death and despair on him, but it has been in her nostrils so often that it's practically an old friend, so it is, in fact, an excuse. In truth, when she came out of hell, she would have preferred to be touched as little as possible.

There aren't a lot of things in this world that she lets touch her. Most things -people- simply fall through her fingers like so many grains of sand. The years have been long and unkind.  She remembers the ones who have, though, as an inheritor of memories. And if they are still alive, she knows it is her duty to remind them.

So, she reminds him who she is, she makes him remember: with her eyes, her face, her tongue. Her lips on his, when he's ready. His kisses are hungry and desperate, he clings to her like a drowning man, and she lets him drown in herself.

When they are home, he showers for a long, long, long time. She lets him sit there - she can picture him, sitting in the tub, drops of water hitting his face, sprinkling his hair, rolling down his chest. When he comes out, he smiles again and nuzzles up to her, but she waves him off. She's busy. She needs a shower, too. She needs some time for herself.

She stands under the running water, steam rising to the ceiling, and runs her fingers tenderly over the flat planes of her stomach, where soft skin covers hard muscle. She also smiles. Her body feels knotted up, lead over bone, but the wet heat feels so good that she can't help but unravel. She knows what tricks to play on herself.

When she comes out, he is sitting on the couch, flipping listlessly through the channels. He's drifting again, she knows without even looking at his face: his posture is slumped in a manner that is not relaxed, but vague and apprehensive at the same time. He's looking at the TV, but the body is scanning for danger.

It's a terrible thing, when they set your own body to betray you.

She walks out in front of him, blocking the television. She's wearing nothing but an oversized fluffy towel, cleverly tucked in.

"I see you found your pants." A smile plays on her lips, a confident, knowing smile. She says something just to say it, just to smile at him about something, it doesn't matter what. It might as well be his worn-out, faded and broken-in jeans, or the lack of a shirt, because he just didn't make it to dressing himself the rest of the way. She's not going to mention the bruises and ugly cuts on his torso, and how they cover her heart in millions of little cracks, thin ice over a bottomless lake, and if you put another ounce of pressure on it, you will fall, fall into dark cold water.

Neither of them can handle pity right now. He gives her that hungry, haunted look that always makes her stop breathing for a second, and she takes it as what he means it to be: an agreement, a plea. She straddles his lap (he looks up at her), strokes his hair, then grabs it, a whole handful, and yanks his head back. He knows this game, he's played this game, he knows their parts, and he bites back the groan. Oh, his damn mouth. She gives him a look from under half-lidded eyes, his head held firmly in place, as though she is appraising him and finding him wanting, and now she's considering what she's going to do with damaged goods. She knows he wants this, too.

They would normally be talking, but not right now.

Her other hand undoes the towel, and it falls around her hips. She has his head in a vice grip now, she's not letting him look anywhere but the ceiling and her face. He twitches, she feels it more than she can see it, but he doesn't move. Sure, he can throw her over and down, but he is bound by something stronger than muscle and bone - he is bound by the rules of the game, the ones they invented.

She leans over and whispers in his ear. _James_.


	7. How Bright It Is Here, Without Refuge

Hospitals again, but this time she knows for a fact that the other two people in the room hate them just as much. Foggy, of course, has more reason than most, pumped full of chemicals and painfully thin. It is unnatural to see the cheekbones on Foggy Nelson. They stand out in sharp relief against the white pillow, and the man’s sleeping face is unrecognizable.

Matt looks down at him calmly, his too-long hair falling over his face, and resting undisturbed. Natasha knows it’s hard for him here. The smell, the noise, the crying in neighboring rooms gets on her nerves, but for him it must be like a sledgehammer to the sinuses. Still, he sits his vigil for his oldest friend, and she can admire that, all things considered.

"You don’t have to come here, you know," he says.

"Don’t be stupid." She lays her hand on his shoulder.

"You don’t owe me anything."

"Matt, this is what friends do."

He puts his hand over hers. “I think it’s a bit above and beyond, Nat. You’re dealing with your own things. Your boyfriend tried to kill me, you know?”

"I would not describe our current relationship in that particular way."

"Oh."

The pause is a little too long. “I can hear you thinking, and no, it had nothing to do with you.”

"Oh?"

She laughs and ruffles his hair. “Oh nothing. You could tell something was wrong, I’m sure, when the two of you met, he must have been acting off, different from the usual, that is.”

He lifts his head up. “I don’t know what the usual is, but yeah, he was all kinds of off. If I had to guess anything from my previous experiences, I’d guess brainwashing. At this point, it’s pretty easy to spot.”

Natasha frowns, rubs her eyebrow. “You never met him before, have you.”

Matt turns towards her fully. “Natasha, the reason I can spot brainwashing from a state away is because I’ve been around you long enough. That’s what happened, didn’t it?”

She doesn’t bother to nod.

"Again?" Matt sounds exasperated.

"I’m a magnet for it."

"I’m sorry. I really am. Anything I can do…?"

She holds up her hand. “I got it. Hence the separation, while I’m figuring it out.”

"Natasha-"

"I’m fine. You have your own problems."

Matt sighs, and slumps in his chair. She rubs his shoulder, and they watch Foggy for a while, together. Natasha wonders if Matt knows that the sleeping man is wearing a Daredevil shirt, but there’s no point in bringing it up.

"Matthew," she breaks the silence. "Have you ever had someone love you and you did not return their feelings, but you think you could someday, although doing so is a profoundly bad idea?"

He considers this. “Yeah. You.”

She throws her head back and laughs with abandon, quiet but breathless, for the first time in days. What is wrong with men?


	8. (a memory)

He moves her hand down, across to the scarring on his shoulder. Rising on her tiptoes, she catches his earlobe between her teeth, and the words brush against him in sighs and whispers. "Please, please"- and his lips curve in a smile that she can't see, because he knows what she wants. The metal hand snakes down to the zipper of her jeans, pulls it down, works itself past the thin layer of underwear. She hides her face in his chest.

The fingers, cool and unfeeling, rest right on the edge of her. A pause. She taps on his arm, making an low, impatient noise.

He sighs exaggeratedly. "I am just a sex toy to you, aren't I?" She can feel his voice in his chest, not loud, but that deep, purring pitch, and her body laps against him, letting his fingers slide up and down her slit.

"Yes, yes you are." She's smiling, cheery, nonchalant even, with no shade of desperation, of course not, but he knows better. One finger pushes inside her, just a little bit, up to the first metal joint, and she exhales in frustration: it's not nearly enough, come on, give me more, dammit, please.

Graciously, he relents, adding a second finger: he's practically holding her up now, her eyes are closed, so she doesn't have to look at his face, smug and satisfied, because her hips are moving determinedly to impale her further on his fingers, push them deeper into her.

Had he been using his other hand, it would feel like being in a furnace, both wet and burning, but the metal doesn't get to feel that. He just gets the varying amount of pressure on his sensors, wrapped up snugly inside her, entirely altruistic.

"How's that?" he asks, and she whines in return, her whole body humming. "You like that?" He grins, of course, the bastard; it's a rhetorical question, he just wants to see her squirm, but he won't stop until she answers, she knows.

"Yeah, it's pretty nice." Her eyes are shut tightly, wrapped up in the sensation, the movement, the heat. She bites her lip, and her hair falls over her face in a mess of crimson, so he stops and brushes it out of her eyes, because he won't let her hide, either.

He tucks the hair behind her ear and tilts up her chin - she opens an eye to check up on him, especially the part here he stopped, and why would he possibly do that when she's so close. And suddenly, his face is blank, and his eyes are neither dark with desire, nor flat like mirrors, they are simply there, blank, dispassionate, dissecting her. "Oh god," she breathes, trying not to grind against him, unable to look away.

The fingers move, and his thumb whirs against her clit, and she is done, undone, seizing up, lips swollen from his kisses and her own teeth, deaf and blind to everything but the wave rising to the skies and crashing into her, though she knows he's watching her, waiting for the perfect moment to catch her as she falls.


	9. Now No One Will Listen To The Songs

"So, Doctor." Natasha leans on her elbows. Stephen Strange does not have the sort of presence that screams 'doctor,' or worse, 'scientist.' The occult crap is much less off-putting, so she neither taps on the table, nor clenches her jaw. Still, magic is not her province. She deals in reality, in bullets and snow, and on very special occasions, in warm pastries.

"So, Madame Romanoff," Strange steeples his fingers over his teacup, exactly like a villain in a play. "You have brought me cinnamon buns."

"Please, no one has called me Madame since…" She trails off and laughs, waving her hand. "I'm not going to show up empty-handed. Consider it an offering to appease the hosts. The Hoggoth ones."

"Do not make fun, Natasha," Stephen's is sonorous. "The hosts, they are-"

"Hoary?"

"Yes, Natasha."

She taps her fingers on the table. The whole experience reminds her of visiting an old Russian witch woman right before the Wall fell. She looked at Natasha's palm, muttered something that sounded like a children's rhyme, then took twenty thousand rubles from Natasha's wallet, leaving her with a feeling deeply familiar to every Russian - that of being thoroughly ripped off. It wasn't unpleasant.

Shame about her rug, though.

"You got something on your mind, Natasha?"

"No, Stephen, this is a fucking social call, come on!" She pushes away her tea and crosses her arms. Mustaches inherently irritate her, and Strange's mustache is so prominent, it's legendary.

"It's true, Avengers rarely come over to each other's houses with pastries, unless they really need something. So, what is it?"

Natasha sighs. "You know how you assisted Matt? After that thing with the baby? And that other thing?"

There is a pause. "Memories are easier taken than restored, Natasha."

She splays her fingers on the table.

"I can try to, hm," Strange clears his throat, "In layman's terms, reconnect the memories, but it would be more like helping you remember information, not the emotional content. You have to live through that. I'm sorry."

Natasha picks her tea back up. Stephen Strange brews a mean cup.

"So, you mean like--"

"Yes, exactly like Ms. Danvers, if you choose to recover. Or you could continue with the gaps in your mind. I simply cannot advise you in this matter, the best I can do is explain the risks. Ultimately, it's your choice."

"I am aware of how informed consent works, Doctor." Natasha's voice echoes in her own ears, and it is so cold it almost clinks.

The raw data she already has. Her little black book, so to speak, contains more than enough facts to piece together a timeline of a relationship, or reconstruct a thorough psychological profile, but nothing takes away the discomfort of watching what feels like someone else's home movie. In the photographs and the videos, they are both strangers. She looks happy in them. She wants to know why.


	10. Give Me To Bitter Glory

_Oh, Volgograd, Stalingrad, Tsaritsyn, the Hero City, shall I sing of you, your steel skies and winding streets, every centimeter bought and paid for in blood?_

Natasha sets the small wreath by the Eternal flame and sits on the marble steps, watching the summer couples wander by, and the guards, with their unlined, smoothly shaven faces, stare ahead. The grave for thirty five thousand people makes a nice park.

What do you do when you remember you have forgotten something? You retrace your steps, you go back to the beginning. She has danced this dance on Moscow rooftops and the ballrooms of St. Petersburg, and under the heavy branches of the taiga evergreens. This is different, though, this is the place you go when you've forgotten who you are.

Natasha has wandered the alleyways already, marveling vaguely at the steel and skyscrapers and grey highways. She stopped at the corner, which, as she has arbitrarily decided a few decades ago, had autobiographical significance, although the only thing suggesting a connection between this building and the one where she was born are the long-faded marks of an ancient fire on the pavement. She dropped by the bombed-out factory, not because she remembered its destruction, after all, what is one hollowed-out building among many, but out of respect for it as a monument of War as much as the screaming statue that blots out the sky, larger than life, taller than the Statue of Liberty, bigger than memory.

The last visit she made before coming to Mamaev Kurgan was the river. It's hard to miss it in Volgograd: you can see the snake of it crawl silver through the plains from space. Yet, every visit, Natasha is startled by how breathtakingly large it is from bank to bank. Standing next to the water, without an edge or end, Natasha sang to it, quietly, that song that all Russians know by heart, the one about being sixteen in the ripe fields and white snow. Then, she hid from a summer shower in her hotel.

The city gleams, built on ruins.

"You know, Ivan, you would have been proud of me," Natasha whispers to the wreath. "I hear I was Captain America's right hand. You'd appreciate the irony, considering his left hand was made by Russians, too."

"Not bad for a redheaded girl you pulled from a fire last century." She chuckles softly. "Not bad for a traitor."

Then Natasha remembers the old man's mouth, twisted in pain as the last tremors of life left him, but the thought does not provoke guilt or pain. Instead, he seems pitiful, helpless. She is long past considering the ideas of curses, but it is her poison that ran through his veins. A girl gambles herself away to get a man a cure that kills him. Crimes and redemptions flow into each other.

It's important to keep track of them.  A long time ago, since the worst thing she could imagine happened to her with annoying regularity, Natasha Romanoff created a database of information on everyone that she knew, and that was a lot of people, and she knew a lot about them. It has been her job to notice things for so long that she is compelled to catalogue the minutia. It's not just the color of everyone's underwear, that's too cheap and easy. But the little things, like how Pepper Potts likes her coffee, how many arrows Clint has in his apartment at any given time, how many underground tunnels lead into Latveria and how many lead out.

According to the proverb, where two people know of something, a third person will as well, or whatever the equivalent of it is in English, but if one of the two is a system encrypted to the point that it is actually more reliable than an Avenger's brain, then she has been willing to run the risk of the system falling into the wrong hands. It has done so in the past, but so have the Avengers' brains, and the capsule has had a better track record.  The data contained therein is obviously highly privileged and should be neither disclosed to anyone, nor even discussed.  It's best if no one is even aware of its existence, but people do find out somehow.  Usually, they find out by her telling them.

She pulls out her phone and re-reads the texts from Jess.

3:02 **so, who was holding the camera?**  
3:03 **the visuals do look steady**  
3:03 **maybe he has a spare arm**  
3:04 **what is wrong with you**  
3:05 **it would be handy**  
3:10 **…**  
3:12 **i swear to all that is holy that was not intentional**  
3:12 **i'm done talking about this**  
3:24 **does it at least look like you're having fun**  
3:35 **it does**

Natasha deletes the texts. She deleted the data, as well, out there by the river. It didn't seem right for her to have it anymore, the memories didn't belong to her, and it wasn't right to see him that exposed, with damp hair clinging to his forehead, and the silver scars ripping through his chest and back.

It wasn't hers anymore.

She touches the wreath one last time, as a goodbye, and gets up.


End file.
